The Lists: Comics

Single Issue Comic Books:(covers from comicvine.com)
Arranged by issue number, and kind of emo, I guess. These aren't necessarily the best comics, though some are. And some are comics I wouldn't like as much if I hadn't read them when I read them. Comic book reading's always tied up with one's personal history as a comic book reader. I'm trying to capture a little bit of that. Hadn't expected it to be weighted so heavily with Vertigo and Vertigo-type material, but there you go.

1. Cages #1 - "Descent" (writer, artist: Dave McKean)

A cat walks down the fire escapes of an old tenement building. An artist checks into the building, hoping to get some painting done. The start of one of the great, unsung works in the medium. I'm a sucker for a good creation story.

This was one of the comics, along with Mr. Punch, Brooklyn Dreams, and parts of Sandman, that had me fired up about comics as a medium, or as the medium in the early 90s. Something about the observational depiction of characters and events in combination with an authorial voice actively engaged in storytelling. It's kind of hard to explain, I guess, but it's similar to the way I'd later come to feel about a certain kind of filmmaking.

2. Big Numbers #1 (writer: Alan Moore, artist: Bill Sienkiewicz)

An English poet returns to her hometown and tries to reconnect with the people she knew, a bunch of other people in the town go about their lives, and some unpleasant Americans plan to build some sort of enormous shopping center.

I often feel like Moore's characters exist more as a function of his ideas than as characters in their own right. And while his ideas and his formal explorations of the medium are usually intriguing, sometimes I wish he'd let his characters just be themselves. He's kind of doing that here, which is why this is my favorite work of his. Things are things, rather than Things with a capital T. You can hear the formal and symbolic machinery rumbling in the background, though, so who knows where this would have gone if the series had gone past three issues. But I'm glad that what's here is here. And the poem at the end, written by the main character, is kind of nice:

Hand me a dead cloud

And a sharp piece of science

I want to see skeleton of weather

And let me map

All maps we have mistaken for the world

And learn by heart the timetable of dice

And in their clutching, self-invented dance steps

See an accidental grace, a choreography.

Still have that memorized after all these years.

3. Bone #2 - "Thorn" (writer, artist: Jeff Smith)
Utterly charming, with great timing. There's something you sometimes see in good comics, more usually in 4-panel newspaper strips than in comic books. It's the way things can suddenly leap forward in the passage from one panel to another in a way that adds impact to a movement, a moment, a gag. I can't quite put it into words, since it sounds like I'm talking about any old panel transition, or any old edit in film, so to see what I mean, look at the two panels in the famous "stupid, stupid rat creatures" gag.

4. Grendel Tales: Devil's Choices #3 (writer: Darko Macan, artist: Edvin Biukovic)
I guess I just like stories where things start to seem like they're going to be okay after all, and then go horribly, horribly wrong. Light sabers are cool, too.

5. Cages #4 - "Time and Origami" (writer, artist: Dave McKean)
There's a sequence here that took my breath away. If you've read this, you know what it is.

6. Local #5 - "The Last Lonely Days of the Oxford Theatre" (writer: Brian Wood, penciler: Ryan Kelly)

Part of a series that follows a woman from town to town, year by year, from the ages of 18 to 32. Here, she's working in a movie theater in Halifax. I guess I respond to the story's slight exaggeration of the way we go about constructing different identities in order to interact with different people. And the melancholy. I always go for melancholy. Because I am a sap. Or a mope.

7. Cages #5 - "Strata" (writer, artist: Dave McKean)

A man and a women meet in a bar. This is perfect comics.

8. Astonishing X-Men #6 - "Gifted, Part 6" (writer: Joss Whedon, penciler: John Cassaday)
"I've got two words for you." Whedon and Cassaday's run on Astonishing is everything that's great about the X-Men, condensed into 25 perfect issues.

9. Gotham Central #7 - "Half a Life, Part 2" (writer: Greg Rucka, artist: Michael Lark)
"Trust me, you want to get it right."

10. Local #11 - "The Younger Generation" (writer: Brian Wood, penciler: Ryan Kelly)

Wood and Kelly really capture something about the movement from early adulthood to just plain living-your-life adulthood. Particularly the way your sense of self shifts while moving through your twenties, what you hold on to, what you let go of, what you carry forward. The whole series does that, but this is the issue, building on the previous ten, is where it really hits home.

11. Bone #16 - "Eyes of the Storm" (writer, artist: Jeff Smith)

It always feels good when the story kicks into a higher gear, the scope widens, and you think, now we're really going somewhere. Things start heading in that direction with Bone #14, but it's in this issue, as Bone, Thorn and Gran'ma Ben try to make it through the forest in a storm while being hunted by a patrol of rat creatures, that you get a real sense of what this comic's going to be.

12. Doom Patrol #19 - "Crawling from the Wreckage, Part 1" (writer: Grant Morrison, artist: Richard Case)
"What do normal people have in their lives?" My favorite comics couple, Cliff Steele and Crazy Jane meet in this issue, and Morrison and the underrated Richard Case kick off a great 45-issue run, also my favorite. This series was one of the things that helped me get through my early twenties. It sounds dumb when I put it like that, but that's the way it was.

13. Zot! #30 - "Autumn" (writer, artist: Scott McCloud)

14. Zot! #31 - "Clash of the Titans" (writer, artist: Scott McCloud)
15. Zot! #33 - "Normal" (writer, artist: Scott McCloud)
Three of Scott McCloud's poignant "Earth Stories," which ran from issue #28 to #36 of Zot! To an extent, you need to read at least some of the preceding 27 issues to get the full impact of these stories.

For most of its run, the comic followed Jenny, a girl from our world, who stumbled into a retro-future utopian world and went on adventures with a teenaged superhero named Zot, who fought villains like 9-Jack-9,
Dekko, and the Blotch. Those first 27 issues were full of unbridled, goofy sci-fi superhero idealism. But with issue 28, Zot and Jenny get stuck in her (and our) much more drab world, and McCloud shift gears. He offers up a series of concise portraits of characters caught up in the distance between ideals and reality, with the ever-optimistic Zot, who can fly and turn invisible, thrown into the mix.

The first of the issues above, "Autumn" focuses on Jenny's mother and her dissolving marriage. There's a splash page I think of every year when the leaves start to change.

The second issue, "Clash of the Titans," follows Jenny's friend Ronnie, an archetypal comic book and rpg geek, through a frustrating day - he argues with a friend about the comic book they're trying to put together, the friend retaliates during a role playing game session by suddenly killing Ronnie's character, and Ronnie's girlfriend, Brandy decides she's going to try dating other guys. In the story, there's an acute awareness of the limitations of the mental territory Ronnie lives in, but there's a sympathy there as well.

The third issue, "Normal," follows Jenny's friend Terry, as she learns that a friend is gay, and struggles with her own sense of identity. In telling Terry's story, McCloud employs some of the ideas he'd later demonstrate in Understanding Comics, not because they're neat but because they allow him to capture on the page what Terry's going through. In all of three of these issues, McCloud tells stories that feel true.

16. Grimjack #37 - "The Revenge of John Gaunt" (writer: John Ostrander, artist: Tom Mandrake)
Grimjack was a comic that blended sci-fi, fantasy and hard-boiled detective fiction. It preceded the grim-n-gritty wave of the 80s by a couple of years, which meant it was drawing from Chandler and Hammett and maybe Leone rather than from Miller and Moore. It was published by a company in Chicago called First Comics, which was kind of a mini-major in the 80s. It was the first semi-indie comic I bought regularly (if you don't count the original, fanzine-ish black and white issues of TMNT). I used to be really into this comic in my mid-teens, which was the right time to read it. It holds less allure now, but I still pull out an issue every now and then. The setting, Cynosure, is one of those fictional worlds that set up shop in my teenage imagination, partly due to writer John Ostrander's collage of genres and settings, and partly due to the art of co-creator Tim Truman, and later, Tom Mandrake.

This issue was kind of the peak of the series. Or the aftermath to the peak of the series, which happened when the lead character, private eye John Gaunt, was killed in the previous issue. (He got better, got worse, died, came back and kept going for another 45 often pretty good issues before dying again.) Gaunt doesn't appear in this issue. Instead, one of the great supporting characters in comics, Gordon the bartender, takes the spotlight, sort of. And one of the other great supporting characters, Bob the gator-lizard, joins him at the end. It occurred to me the other day that, as someone who always found himself to be more of a supporting character in other people's stories than a lead in his own, I probably took on Gordon as a fictional role model.

That's not Gordon on the cover. That's the Major, the villain of the piece. In this issue, Gordon, the unflappable, generally mild-mannered but occasionally heavy-ordinance-packing bartender disguises himself as the beret-and-cape-wearing, sword-and-gun-wielding hard-bitten, terminally depressed alcoholic interdimensional detective Grimjack in order to track down the Major, the vaguely undead Lee Van Cleef-esque evil dimension-hopping cowboy who killed the detective. Then the bartender went back to the bar to tell the sad, 3-foot long, gin-drinking, cig-smoking talking gator-lizard that their boss was avenged. It was that sort of book.

17. Sandman #37 - "I Woke Up and One of Us Was Crying" (writer: Neil Gaiman, penciler: Shawn McManus)

The close to the "A Game of You" storyline. I'm not crazy about the way one character's midwestern family are depicted as a bunch of small-minded hicks (though part of that's due to McManus' usually effective broad caricature art style, and there are plenty of folk like that, after all). Still, as a eulogy for that character, not to mention as a conclusion for this story arc about identity, this issue's so moving, that it doesn't really matter. The last two pages are my favorite close to any storyline I've read, Sandman or otherwise, and about as moving a two pages of comics I've seen. The last page in particular. I always think about it when I've had to say a real goodbye to someone.

18. Sandman #43 - "The People Who Remember Atlantis..." (writer: Neil Gaiman, penciler: Jill Thompson)
I guess this isn't the best issue of the series, but it's a great example of Sandman moving along, doing it's Sandman kind of thing. Actually, the full title of the issue is: The People Who Remember Atlantis - Concerning Mammoths, and Falling Walls - Who Controls Transportation? - Bored, She Makes Little Frogs - Truth or Consequences, and Other Places - Ancestral Voices Prophesying - The Dogs of Art - "When I Dream, Sometimes I Remember How." It's part of a long, rambling road story called "Brief Lives."

The opening segment of this issue, "The People Who Remember Atlantis," is one of those things Gaiman does so well, where, in a matter of a few lines, he weaves a mythology that sounds timeless, as if it's always been around and he's just reminding everyone about it. Later, there's a scene where a receptionist tries to describe Dream's rarely sane sister Delirium to her boss, and Delirium keeps interrupting. This is one of my favorite bits in the series. (Receptionist to Dream: "Is this person with you?" Delirium: "I'm not a person.")

I guess this issue's also here on the list because of the second segment, "Concerning Mammoths, and Falling Walls." It starts with a man getting off a bus, remembering a dream about mammoths (the man is older than he looks), and ends with Death telling him: "You get what anybody gets. You get a lifetime." It's another great example of something Gaiman does so well - craft these little moments that stick in your mind because they're so utterly true.

19. New Mutants #45 - "We Were Only Foolin'" (writer: Chris Claremont, penciler: Jackson Guice, inks: Kyle Baker!)
Great art by Guice and Baker. Baker's inks during this period always made any penciller's artwork seem much more photo-real, something which really enhanced the impact of this heavy-handed but effective story about passing and prejudice. The story's not subtle, but the art is, and that combination is one of the reasons why this issue's stuck with me for twenty-four years.

20. Sandman #55 - "Cerements" (writer: Neil Gaiman, pencilers: Shea Anton Pensa, Bryan Talbot)

Another thing Gaiman does well is tell stories about storytelling. In this storyline, "Worlds' End," a group of people from various places are hunkered down in the Worlds' End, an inn between worlds, as they wait out a multi-cosmic storm that stretches across realities. They pass the time telling stories. This one's from a guy named Petrefax, an apprentice in the necropolis Litharge, a city whose inhabitants are charged with maintaining funeral rites for the cities and worlds all around them. His story has, if I'm remembering correctly, a tale within a tale within a tale within a tale. Actually, in addition to the deepest tale, it has a bunch of tales within a tale within a framing story, which is later revealed to be in another story. If I've got that right. And the reason for telling stories within Petrefax's story reflects back on what the people in the inn are doing, and foreshadows later events in the series.

It's hard to single out individual issues in Sandman, but I guess what I like about this one is how, in addition to its elaborate narrative construction, it captures a sense of the way we tell stories to each other, why we tell them, the way they get handed down to us, and the way we sift through the events of our lives and recast them as stories we tell to others.

In the introduction to his short story collection, Fragile Things, Gaiman says: "I believe we owe it to each other to tell stories. It's as close to a credo as I have or will, I suspect, ever get." That's why his work has been important to me - because stories are important to me.

21. Doom Patrol #63 - "The Empire of Chairs" (writer: Grant Morrison, penciler: Richard Case)
"Come in out of the rain." My single favorite issue of any comic.

22. Shade #70 - "How It All Started" (writer: Peter Milligan, penciler: Richard Case)
The leads of this series, Shade, Kathy and Lenny got put through the wringer over the course of the series. Next to Crazy Jane and Cliff Steele in Doom Patrol, and to a lesser extent, Wesley Dodds and Dian Belmont in Sandman Mystery Theatre, the triangle between Shade, Kathy and Lenny was the comic book relationship I was most invested in back in the early Vertigo days.

Which is weird because there aren't really all that many issues where the relationships exist in any kind of stable form, and because Shade, in particular, gets increasingly unpleasant once the series gets past issue 32. By the later issues of the series, Kathy's gone, Shade's a literally heartless jerk, Lenny's exchanged her unflappable cool for vengeful bitterness directed at Shade, and as a reader, I was kind of exhausted. This final issue of the series isn't the best, but it was such a good thing to see all three characters get a shot at a happy ending.

23. Sandman #73 - "Sunday Mourning" (writer: Neil Gaiman, penciler: Michael Zulli)

I guess I like aftermaths. This hits just the right combination of ruefulness and warmth, of acknowledging loss and the mistakes of the past while embracing the good feeling of picking yourself up and getting on with life. Plus, we get to say goodbye to Hobb Gadling, who was a fine character.

24. The Incredible Hulk #105 - "Armageddon Part II" (writer: Greg Pak, penciler: Carlo Pagulayan)
With a good writer, the Hulk's a great character.

I'm generally not too into the whole praising medium specificity thing. I'm more of a horses for courses kind of person - use whatever works best for the story being told, regardless of whether or not it's unique to the medium. (This is one reason I'm all for voiceover in film if it's used well.) But the splash page is more or less unique to comics, and that moment of opening up from smaller panels to a full page can really enhance a story beat. Throughout the Planet Hulk storyline, Carlo Pagulayan (or maybe it's Greg Pak, or maybe it's the two working together) makes superb use of the splash page. The best one is in this issue, a quiet moment after the storyline's violent climax, the Hulk in the foreground, his fury spent, everything he tried to build gone, his head hanging in despair, and in the background, his companions' ship piercing the smoke, coming down from the sky, with its terrible offer of retribution. Or something like that. And yeah, the whole storyline's about the Hulk building a life as a gladiator and later rebel and later a king on an alien world, which is goofy, but it's comics.

There's also kind of a nice prayer that gets used by some of the characters in the storyline, and gets used at the beginning of this issue as everything falls apart: "Cool my eyes. Warm my heart. Let me dream again."

25. Uncanny X-Men #202 - "X-men... I've Gone to Kill the Beyonder" (writer: Chris Claremont, penciler: John Romita Jr.)

The first issue of X-men I read, way back in the day. Probably wouldn't grab me now as it did then. A de-powered, mohawked Storm leading the group. Magneto newly joined and newly reformed. Rachel Summers overpowered, off on her own, ready to explode. The X-men taking down Sentinels with teamwork. JRjr on art, drawing my favorite rendition of Rogue (my X-man of choice). The heads up in the corner box on the cover. Everything I liked about the comic while growing up is here, except for the whole hated, feared, outcast thing. Which would kick back in soon enough.

And four more comics for good measure:

26. Sensational Spider-Man Annual #1 - "To Have and To Hold" (writer: Matt Fraction, artist: Salvador Larroca)

This, together with Sensational Spider-Man #40 ("The Book of Peter," by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Clayton Crain), kind of serves as a "Whatever Happened To Your Friendly Neighborhood Wall-Crawler," ala Alan Moore's "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow" and Neil Gaiman's "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader."

There's this thing called continuity that, as a long-time comics reader you wind up dealing with, or being aware of. It's not so much continuity with a capital C, the set of things currently considered to have actually happened to a character, as it is a sense of the history of a character or a title. Even if you're not to caught up with it, don't care about it, just want good stories, it's still something that you're aware of. And particularly in the last decade or so, it's something the comics writers are aware of, and sometimes make use of. It's kind of like a natural resource that's built up over the decades of a title or character's existence. And it's a reminder of how much time you've put in reading these things, how many pages you've turned, how much mental space you've given over to the details of this or that fictional life. Every so often, you read a story that makes that investment worthwhile. This is one of those stories.

27. Uncanny X-Men #210 - "The Morning After" (writer: Chris Claremont, penciler: John Romita Jr.)

The best issues of X-Men were always the in-between issues, when they were just being family, watching out for each other. This was the first of those types of issues I read. Here's another more recent, probably better one along those lines.

X-men #210 was also the last issue before the first of the big mutant cross-overs, "The Mutant Massacre." So it's kind of the end of an era. From Dave Cockrum to John Byrne, back to Cockrum, to Paul Smith to John Romita Jr., Uncanny X-men felt like it was unfolding in a single timeframe, as a continuous series of stories. Things started to slip and fade after this, as they always do on long-running titles. This issue is the moment before the family and the title begin to fracture.

28. Sandman Mystery Theater #26 - "The Butcher: Act 2 of 4" (writers: Matt Wagner, Steven T. Seagle, artist: Guy Davis)

This issue, like Shade #70 above, is kind of standing in for the whole series. It's difficult to pick out a single one, since there's a uniformity to each issue, and to each storyline. Apart from the final two issues, and a one-shot (Sandman Midnight Theatre), each story ran in four issue arcs, each following more or less the same pattern: a series of terrible crimes is committed, the golden age Sandman, Wesley Dodds, has some dreams about it (always shown in an elliptic, 9-panel page), he and his girlfriend Dian Belmont, daughter of the New York City D.A., get involved, working in parallel to and usually clashing with the investigation of homicide detective Lt. Burke, as ruminations about life play out in the caption boxes, until the case is cracked and the villain is apprehended. This is intentional, I think. Setting the series in the late thirties, Wagner, Seagle and Davis (who also created a cool if rough retro-punk version of Sherlock Holmes called Baker Street) are going for the feel of an updated pulp or radio series, and they more or less get it right each arc.

What was great about the series was never the mystery aspect (you usually have a good sense of who the villain is by the end of the second issue), but the relationship between Wes and Dian. They're kind of like Nick and Nora Charles, with less drinking (usually) and more between-the-sheets shenanigans. Wes is also kind of an anti-Bruce Wayne, while Dian is the anti-every-hero's-girlfriend-you've-ever-read.

For each arc, the caption box narration alternates between Wes and Dian. That is, for one arc, Wes gets the caption boxes, and for the next, it's Dian. Usually, their thoughts in the captions are only tangentially connected to the case. Instead, although they always parallel whatever's happening in the main action, the captions focus either Wes or Dian's thoughts on the current stage of their relationship. This, along with the increasingly active role Dian takes as the series progresses (both in their relationship and in their investigations) really made the book stand out. Wes is usually the one taking the risks, running around, getting beat up and shot at, shooting criminals with his gas gun, but the book was as much Dian's as his. There weren't many female leads like Dian Belmont in the 90s, certainly not from the major publishers, and really, there still aren't.

29. Doom Patrol #60 - "Brief Candles" (writer: Grant Morrison, penciler: Richard Case)

It's a trope of superhero comics to bring the hammer down on a team, both from within ("Everything you knew was wrong!") and from without ("At their darkest moment, they face their undefeatable foe!"), but I can't think of another time it worked as well as it does in this climactic Candlemaker storyline.

Partly, this is due to Richard Case's art, his evolving character designs for leads Cliff Steele and Crazy Jane, and the understated, absurd yet prosaic world he'd built over the course of his run.

Partly, this is because by the time this story gets under way, Morrison's been subverting the idea of the superhero and superhero comics for over three years. When he cuts loose and just goes for those big, standard story beats, while still holding onto all of the weirdness that makes the Doom Patrol the Doom Patrol, it just gives everything some extra oomph. And it's partly because these aren't mainstay franchise characters who are shackled financially to the status quo (something that undermined what Pak did with the Planet Hulk storyline) - there's no guarantee that any of the members of the Doom Patrol will be around next issue.

Mostly, it's because by this point, you really care about the characters and the unique family they've formed and you don't want to see that fall apart. As the storyline unfolds, you know regardless of whatever and whoever survives, things won't be the same. Which is the way life works.

So when you're reading this issue, and what's left of the Doom Patrol has teamed up with drunken John Constantine-knockoff/parody Willoughby Kipling to try and stop the Candlemaker, a demon summoned from the mind of Dorothy Spinner, the ape-faced girl, and Cliff's leaping out of a skyscraper to get away from the Candlemaker, who just killed one of Cliff's surviving teammates, and Crazy Jane's lost her powers, and Kipling's just had his arm blasted off and wants a drink, and Dorothy's freaking out, and they're trying to get to Danny the Street, a sentient transvestite street that can move from city to city, and they're hoping the Candlemaker won't follow because they have no way of stopping it, and the Candlemaker sends Crazy Jane to hell (depicted on the cover), and Cliff's jumping behind the wheel of a car and slamming it into the Candlemaker just to buy a little time, you kind of sense Morrison is not messing around, that this is it.

You get that kind of sensation these days on some arc-based TV shows, and in some comics that have long, limited runs, but there weren't too many places you could get this, to this degree, back in 1992. Not that I can remember, at least.

The title would continue for a while after Morrison left, under the guidance of Rachel Pollack, who took a decent if not entirely successful run at it (producing some good issues, like issue 74, and creating a character, Kate Godwin, who was a worthy addition to the team). And DC would later revive the title a few times, taking it in different directions. And Morrison would hone his skills as a writer, and go on to greater success and acclaim on other titles, becoming one of the major architects of the New Silver Age, or whatever you want to call it. But Doom Patrol after Morrison was never as good. And there's something missing from Morrison's later work, something that had been there in Doom Patrol and Animal Man.

I don't want to say his later work doesn't have the same heart, or the same degree of compassion, because that's not true. But when Morrison later wrote other books about outcasts, such as The Invisibles and New X-Men, there came to be this kind of "you're either with us or you're against us" thing, along with an insistent attitude of coolness, neither of which were there in his earlier work. These later series felt to me as excluding and, in their own way, as bullying and insistently normalizing as the schemes of any ranting Doom Patrol villain, albeit with a different normality being preached. There would have been little room for a Josh Clay in The Invisibles, for example.

I don't know. Maybe I read too much into these things. Anyways, Doom Patrol #60 was great.

Graphic Novels or Collections:

(Alphabetical order)
1. Berlin: City of Stones, by Jason Lutes
2. Bone: The Complete Cartoon Epic, by Jeff Smith (I don't like the changes he made from the original comics, however. With few exceptions, I think they weaken the story.)
3. Cages, by Dave McKean (Favorite)
4. Doom Patrol: Crawling from the Wreckage, by Grant Morrison and Richard Case
5. Fun Home, by Allison Bechdel
6. Gotham Central: Half a Life, by Greg Rucka, Michael Lark
7. "Ha Ha Herman," Charlie Brown, by Charles Schulz
8. Jar of Fools, by Jason Lutes

9. Local, by Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly
10. Mage: The Hero Discovered, by Matt Wagner
11. Mr. Punch, by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean
12. The New Frontier, by Darwyn Cooke
13. Planet Hulk, by Greg Pak, Carlo Pagulayan, et. al.
14. Sandman: A Game of You, by Neil Gaiman, Shawn McManus, Bryan Talbot, Collen Doran
15. Sandman: Worlds' End, by Neil Gaiman, Bryan Talbot, et. al.
16. Sandman: The Kindly Ones, by Neil Gaiman, Marc Hempel, et. al.
17. Stop Snowing on My Secretary, by Charles Schulz
18. 'Toons for Our Times, by Berkely Breathed
19. Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud

20. Why I Hate Saturn, by Kyle Baker
21. Zot! The Complete Black and White Collection, by Scott McCloud

Comic Book Covers:
(Covers from Comic Vine.com)
1.Doom Patrol #78 (Kyle Baker)
2. Sandman #36 (Dave McKean)
3. Zot! #33 (Scott McCloud)
4. Doom Patrol #63 (Richard Case)
5. Grimjack #30 (Doug Rice)
6. Local #5 (Ryan Kelly)
7. The Incredible Hulk #95 (Jose Ladrönn)
8. Local #8 (Ryan Kelly)
9. Astonishing X-Men #6
10. Annihilation: Conquest #2 (Aleksi Briclot)
11. The Invisibles #8 (Brian Bolland)
12. Zot! #30 (Scott McCloud)
13. Cages #2 (Dave McKean)
14. Runaways #19 (Jo Chen)
15. Books of Magic #32 (Mike Kaluta)
16. Doom Patrol #46 (Simon Bisley)
17. Thor #379 (Walt Simonson)
18. Sandman #51 (Dave McKean)
19. Sandman #39 (Dave McKean)
20. Sandman Mystery Theatre #14 (Gavin Wilson, Richard Bruning)
21. The Incredible Hulk #417 (Gary Frank)

And a few more for good measure:
22. Star-Spangled War Stories #103
23. Tales to Astonish #13 (Jack Kirby)
24. Books of Magic #12 (Charles Vess)
25. Books of Magic #13 (Charles Vess)
26. Doom Patrol #59 (Tom Taggart)
27. The Incredible Hulk #96 (Jose Ladrönn)
28. Doom Patrol #28 (Simon Bisley)
29. The Incredible Hulk #373 (Dale Keown)
30. Doom Patrol #40 (Simon Bisley)
31. Local #12 (Ryan Kelly)
32. Doom Patrol #77 (Kyle Baker)
33. Zot! 24 (Scott McCloud)

34. Bone #20 (Jeff Smith)
35. Doom Patrol #32 (Simon Bisley)
36. Sandman Mystery Theatre #47 (Gavin Wilson, Richard Bruning)
37. Sandman Mystery Theatre #48 (Gavin Wilson, Richard Bruning)
38. Sandman Mystery Theatre #55 (Gavin Wilson, Richard Bruning)
39. Sandman Mystery Theatre #56 (Gavin Wilson, Richard Bruning)
40. Sandman #24 (Dave McKean)
41. The Incredible Hulk #372 (Dale Keown)
42. Annihilation: Conquest #1 (Aleksi Briclot)
43. Strangers in Paradise #12 (Terry Moore)
44. The Invisibles #13 (Brian Bolland)
45. The Invisibles #14 (Brian Bolland)
46. Runaways #18 (Marcos Martin)
47. Runaways #19 (Jo Chen)
48. Alpha Flight #40 (Dave Ross)
49. Sandman #32 (Dave McKean)